That Manhattan gallery was, of course, the now-defunct Knoedler. As ARTnewsreported in June:

London-based hedge-fund manager Pierre Lagrange, who, in 2007, purchased a painting purportedly by Jackson Pollock for more than $17 million […] now believes that he was duped and that the work is a fake. He is demanding his money back.

Knoedler closed a day after a negative scientific analysis report on the Pollock was received.

The settlement between Lagrange, a hedge fund manager, and the gallery is confidential but “amicable,” as a spokesman for Knoedler’s former president, Ann Freedman, told The Times in October.

* * *

Not so for the hedge fund managers and other masters of the universe who bankrolled Karl Rove’s Crossroads Super PAC to elect Mitt Romney and a slew of Republicans in races across the country. Amanda Terkel of The Huffington Postwrites:

“The billionaire donors I hear are livid,” one GOP operative told The Huffington Post. “There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don’t know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing.”

* * *

An article by The Times’ Carol Vogel exactly one year ago explained how “Sotheby’s Strong Sale Revives Art Market in One Night”:

Rowdy art handlers — who have been locked out of Sotheby’s over a labor dispute since the summer — blew whistles and shouted insults at the crowds who poured into Sotheby’s Upper East Side auction house on Wednesday night for its auction of Impressionist and modern art. But for all the anger outside the building, inside there was excitement and a great deal of relief as an international crowd of collectors and dealers watched the auction market come back to life.

The amount of money spent on that one night at Sotheby’s totaled $199.8 million.

* * *

On November 4th, an editorial appeared in The Times by Aaron B. O’Connell, an assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, on “The Permanent Militarization of America.” O’Connell extensively quotes President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he coined the term “military-industrial complex” and spoke eloquently about the defense budget’s effect on the social fabric:

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

* * *

The U.S. death toll from Hurricane Sandy is more than 100, hundreds of thousands are still without power, tens of thousands are homeless, and the cost of rebuilding will run as high as $50 billion.

* * *

On Wednesday night, Christie’s held its fall Impressionist and Modern Evening Sale, where $204.8 million was spent on 48 works. Fetching the highest price ($43.76 million) was Claude Monet’s “Nymphéas” (1905); Constantin Brancusi’s “Une muse” (1912), which Christie’s sold in 1986 for $880,000, went for $12.4 million; “Study for Improvisation 8” (1909) by Wassily Kandinsky was bought by a telephone bidder for $23.04 million.

The International Herald Tribunearticle by Souren Melikian that detailed the auction was headlined “Christie’s Sale Suffers From Sky-High Expectations.”

North Americans call the NY Times the Times and add “London” to denote the UK paper. Cultural differences, I guess.

http://www.facebook.com/Balhatain Brian Sherwin

“deciding the fate of a fake politician.”. Interesting. What is a ‘real’ politician? The person who wins? Is a ‘fake politician’ a politician who makes promises that he or she can’t live up to… or really does not believe in? There seems to be a lot of that going around. Period.